The T-shirt that tells you if you're ill - using sensors woven into the fabric

The day when your jeans, T-shirt or even underwear knows when you’re ill isn’t far away, say textile nanotechnologists.

Scientists at the Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and the University of Cagliari in Italy have found a way of making transistors from cotton fibres.

They say that the applications for their research could include carpets that know how many people have walked on them, firefighting suits that detect airborne pollutants and clothing that can incorporate heart-rate and sweat monitoring sensors.

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At first the idea of turning cotton clothing into a computerised circuit board doesn’t make sense, as the fabric is a natural insulator.

The team got round this problem by applying a layer of gold nanoparticles to individual strands, along with the conductive polymer PEDOT.

They liken the process to dyeing.

Thread of the story: Conductive cotton

This process improved the conductivity of the cotton by a factor of about 1000, with the material still retaining its suppleness.

However, it’s still no match for a silicon circuit, because the electrons don’t travel as fast.

This limits the applications that are possible – for instance, you can’t use this process to turn your jumper into an MP3 player – but creating material sensors is entirely possible.

Hinestroza said: ‘If you think about how many fibers you have in your T-shirt, and how many interconnections you have between the weft and the warp of the fabric, you could get pretty decent computing power.’